The History of electricity Do not have an exact and definitive moment of beginning in the time line of humanity. Electricity as a physical phenomenon in nature has accompanied man since prehistory, always surrounded by the fascinating and the mysterious.
Its discovery can be traced back almost 3000 years BC. And brings us back to the era of digital electronics. But the way in which society today produces, distributes, installs and uses it to energize all devices worldwide is but the culmination of the last almost 400 years of research and development.
Different phases of the background of electricity
In the ancient world
Many phenomena related to static electricity and magnetism have attracted human observation from ancient times, beginning with fascination and equal fear of lightning during thunderstorms and subsequent thunder.
Without real theories to explain such behavior, for millennia the lightning was kept enveloped in a cloud of mystery that did not reach beyond being recognized as some kind of power or energy.
Even the ancient cultures ended up explaining these phenomena giving them mystical, cosmic or divine properties.
The best example is the number of gods identified with thunderstorms: Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Rome, Thor in Scandinavia, Raijin in the Shinto religion, Indra for the Hindu religion and Perun in Slavic mythology.
The man was particularly curious to note that this electrical phenomenon was replicated, on a much smaller scale, when the cat's fur fabrics were rubbed against certain materials. If it happened in dark spaces, they could see a kind of spark between the surfaces.
This effect was recorded for the first time around 600 years BC. By the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus . He managed to experiment with amber and various types of skins to create an electric shock. To his surprise, the rubbed surface also attracted very light objects to its surface.
In ancient Egypt, certain fish of the Nile were known to emit some sort of electric shock.
They called them"Tronadores del Nilo", name that leaves total evidence of having already made the connection-symbolic or speculative-with the atmospheric phenomenon of lightning.
Some sources say that both in Greece and in Rome were used"torpedo fish"to treat certain diseases, such as sleeping legs with arthritis with electric shock or intense migraines, both cases to relieve pain. If so, it could be considered as the first Electroshock therapy Of history.
There is a theory that the light of the famous Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was of an electrical character in some capacity.
Historical reports indicate that light could be seen almost 48 kilometers out at sea and was so bright that it could blind seafarers and burn enemy ships.
Wonders - The Glabool Alexandria lighthouse via Vimeo.
Proponents of this theory admit that the power source of the lighthouse is a total mystery, but that an electric light is the only possible explanation for such light intensity. A large arc lamp with a large concave mirror could have created that effect.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
From ancient Greece to the Middle East and China, the existence of the magnet stone in nature was discovered; Which were pieces of mineral iron with the intriguing property of attracting certain metals.
Some were discovered near the city of Magnesia, in ancient Byzantium, where the words"magnetism"and"magneto"come from. The Chinese discovered that this mineral magnet passed its magnetic properties to a piece of steel coming into contact with it.
The Chinese also discovered that by placing magnet stone or a thin sliver of magnetized steel on light material floating in a container with water, it aligned with the magnetic north of the earth. From there came the compass.
In the 1600 AD And after nearly 1200 years of Western scientific emptiness, William Gilbert, an English physician to the service of Queen Elizabeth, published a book entitled From Magnete , Where it used for the first time the word"electricity"taking it of the Latin electricus, that in turn comes from the Greek term elektron; Both words to name the amber material.
In this work, Gilbert expounded his ideas based on years of experiments conducted on static electricity, magnetism and gravity.
With this he founded a scientific interest in the scholars of the time that simply grew and spread throughout Europe and then to the United States.
The road to power plants
From the eighteenth century, efforts to understand, capture and control electricity had no rest. The idea was to produce electrical energy outside the phenomena of nature already observed and studied for centuries.
The famous experiment of the kite of Benjamin Franklin In 1752 during a storm, he verified that the energy of the lightning was effectively electricity.
He tied a metal wrench to the kite rope and the electric charge flowed through the rainwater giving him conductive properties. From this experiment the lightning rod was derived.
For the next 150 years, many inventors and scientists tried to use electricity to power appliances and devices in a campaign to market it as products financed and distributed from the business world:
- In 1831, Michael Faraday created the first electric motor, demonstrating a relationship between electrical energy through mechanical energy and motion.
- In 1837, Samuel Breese Morse creates an electromagnetic circuit capable of transmitting pulses, along with a key representing letters and numbers with dots and dashes; The telegraph and the Morse key.
- In 1857, Heinrich Geissler invented the vacuum pump where electricity was propagated differently. It was the precursor of the fluorescent neon bulb.
- In 1879, Thomas Edison created a reliable electric bulb that supported the energy and maintained light for a long time; The incandescent lamp. After two years he designed and built the first power plants; In London, giving power to thousands of lamps, and in New York.
- By the end of 1880, several cities in the United States had small power plants with the Edison design, but only energized a few blocks.
References
- Mary Bellis (2017). History of Electricity - Electrical science was established in the Elizabethan Age. ThoughtCo. Retrieved from thoughtco.com.
- Frederick Collier Bakewell (1853). Electric Science: Its History, Phenomena, and Applications (Online Book). Ingram, Cooke. Retrieved from books.google.co.ve.
- David P. Stern (2010).Early History of Electricity and Magnetism. Educational Web Sites on Astronomy, Physics, Spaceflight and the Earth's Magnetism. Retrieved from phy6.org.
- com. Before There Were Lights: A History of Electricity in the U.S. Tennessee Valley Authority. Retrieved from tvakids.com.
- Rosalie E. Leposky (2000). A Brief History of Electricity. Electrical Contractor. Retrieved from ecmag.com.
- Ancient Electricity. Recovered from aquiziam.com.
- Mary Bellis (2017). Timeline of Electronics. Retrieved from thoughtco.com.
- Fabian Muñoz (2014). Timeline - History of Electricity. Prezi Inc. Retrieved from prezi.com.